Ultimate Nature of Reality: What is it made up of?
“What is the ultimate nature of reality.”
“Are there multiple truths or multiple sides of the same truth?”
“Can we be sure of our existence despite the inadequacies of our perceptual system?”
Questions of such magnitude have puzzled thinkers of the world since the dawn of humankind.
There is a recurring thought in Jainism that reality is multi-sided and infinitely complex, i.e. there are multiple ways to understand the truth and any viewpoint presents only a part of the truth.
About two millennia later similar reasoning was done by John Stuart Mill, a staunch advocate for liberalism and liberty of thought. He argued that we should not censor any ideas (not even the wrong ones) because even the detrimental ideas have an element of truth in them. Such reasoning works as an antidote against polarization, as one would be conscious of the truth present on the other side of the argument.
The debate regarding the ultimate nature of reality is a recurring topic in cultures across the globe. Each culture tried to come up with its conception of reality and truth. Christians came up with the idea of an all-good, all-knowing, and all-mighty creator, while Hindus believed in an endless cycle of rebirth and karma.
In a more formalized and academic setting, movements such as Modernism and Postmodernism have made their attempts.
Modernism, often associated with “The Age of Reason and Enlightenment” of 17th Century Europe, rejected the traditional basis of objective reality and in its place established a more rational and scientific basis of objectivity. Many such Modern thinkers include Spinoza, Kant, Bacon, Rousseau, and many others. The advent of modern science aimed to understand the objective through the synthesis of empiricism and rationalism. All this combined with a free market of ideas led to the medical and technological advancements that we relish today. With Modernism, everything had a basis in objectivity: truth, reality, and even morality. However, with the arrival of postmodernism, we were left with the mere meaninglessness of reality. The postmodernists pointed out the fact that a given text can have multiple interpretations hence, there is no meaning in treating one text as being more valid than the other. Since God is dead and interpretations vary across cultures, there is no point in treating the truth as an objective entity, rather everything falls under subjectivity. The extension of this idea would involve wrecking the core assumptions upon which society rests, claiming them to be oppressively imposed, and in no time we get a man transforming into a woman.
While the postmodernists are right about the subjectivity of reality but incorrect about the meaninglessness that is associated with it.
The Psychoanalyst Carl Jung talked of the common structures present in our psyche known as archetypes guiding our collective behavior and culture as a whole. If there do exist certain common structures among people across all cultures, it would explain why all cultures had some sort of idea regarding a deity, and as anthropologists have found all of them shared the basic morality of not killing, stealing, cheating, or deceit. While the elaborative cultural idea of morality may be different and subjective but at the most basic level they do share a common structure of morality, guided by evolution.
In response to postmodernism, it could be said that while the interpretations vary, still the common essence or the basic structure of that concept can be found in all or at least most of the definitions. For instance, if you ask a class full of undergrads to define a vague concept like consciousness, all of them would come up with a different definition but the presence of the word “awareness” could be found in pretty much all the definitions, making ‘awareness’ the basic structure of consciousness.
This methodology of finding out the commonality prevailing in definitions helps to bring us closer to the objective reality. Hence the postmodernist claim of its absence may be refuted.
However, the question of objective truth and the ultimate nature of reality becomes much more complex when we take into account the prevailing advancements in neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. In his book, “The Brain,” Dr. David Eagleman explains how we don’t perceive reality as it is, rather we get to see it as is transformed by our brains for us to witness. Outside the brain there is just energy and matter, there exist no colors, no odors, and reality is just dull out there but our brains bring colors to our lives and fill them with emotions, responsibilities, logic, and as a result we have a proper narrative being played inside the sealed chamber of the cranium.
“No one is having an experience of the objective reality that actually exists, each creature perceives what it has evolved to perceive.”
- DR DAVID EAGLEMAN
This brings us to the problem posed by evolutionary biologists and psychologists. According to this school of thought, the fundamental purpose of life is to adapt to our environment and pass on our genes to the newer generations. Evolution takes place at both the physical as well as the mental. Hence all our mental faculties: thinking, imagination, logic, and rationality are a by-product of evolution, a process that evidently shows that at the core we are just selfish creatures who wish to ensure their survival. At the most fundamental level, there seems to be no place for objectivity and reality, hence such a question is irrelevant and the truth does not exist in the evolutionary framework.
This has a bearing on the fact that the brain makes sense of the meaningless as it is serving its evolutionary purpose. All the heated philosophical and political debates can be reduced to mere neural firings in your brain, the question of objective reality happens to be one of them. What actually exists out there may not be known, for our minds did not evolve for that purpose.
This however by no means should suggest that we should end up as nihilists. We can still continue our lives as moral animals along with the awareness that there is no greater good out there and can get a lot more humble about our worldviews such that harsh conflict can be controlled. Rather than associating morality with divinity, we may perceive them as mere tools that serve as guiding principles for organizing society. Such a worldview would be a lot more honest and in line with our understanding of what’s actually out there. Hence we may go on to lead to a more enlightened life.
